The AI Art Debate: Cory Doctorow on Information Theory and Creative Intent

AI-created, human-edited.

In a fascinating segment of the Intelligent Machines podcast hosted by Leo Laporte and Paris Martineau, renowned science fiction author and digital rights activist Cory Doctorow shared his deeply skeptical view on AI-generated art. Their discussion delved into fundamental questions about creativity, consciousness, and what truly constitutes meaningful artistic expression in an age of rapidly advancing AI technologies.

Doctorow, who creates handcrafted digital collages for his blog, presented what he calls an "information theory" perspective on AI art. His central argument hinges on the communicative nature of true art: 

"Art is the process of taking a big, irreducible, numinous feeling that is in the creator's head, imbuing some intermediate medium with that numinous thing as best as you can... and then hoping that some facsimile materializes in an audience member's head when they experience the work."

According to Doctorow, when an artist creates, they make "millions of tiny, little subconscious communicative decisions" to transfer that feeling. In contrast, AI art can only contain as much information as exists in the prompt provided to it. The AI itself adds no intentional communication—no "big, numinous, irreducible feeling"—beyond the statistical probability of what pixels or words should come next.

Doctorow characterizes AI-generated art as having, at best, an "eeriness" that he defines as "the seeming of intent without an intender, like the way the planchette of the ouija board moves." At worst, he considers it "soulless" because whatever communicative intent it appears to have is so thinly spread across probabilistic outputs that it becomes nearly undetectable.

Paris Martineau supported this view, highlighting that what differentiates even seemingly "low-effort" art pieces like Duchamp's urinal or the famous banana taped to a wall from AI art is the presence of an artist—"an intender"—who conceived the work with the intention of it being perceived by an audience.

Leo Laporte pushed back on these assertions, suggesting this perspective might be somewhat "chauvinistic" in assuming humans are fundamentally different from machines. He pointed to examples like AlphaGo's famous "Move 37" in its match against Lee Sedol—a move initially thought to be a mistake but later recognized as a breathtaking innovation that no human would have conceived.

"If it can create, in the sense that it can add information, it could do something a human wouldn't necessarily be able to do, then it is valuable," Laporte argued, suggesting that if AI can make connections humans wouldn't see, it might be adding genuine information to the system.

Doctorow countered by distinguishing between mechanical processes and consciousness. He acknowledged that mechanical systems can produce surprising and useful outputs without being conscious or creative in the human sense. He compared AI's ability to make unexpected connections to creativity prompts like Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies deck or tarot cards—useful tools that provoke human creativity but aren't themselves creative.

The conversation shifted to whether technological innovation necessarily translates to artistic value. While all participants agreed that AI systems can produce valuable innovations in certain domains, Martineau clarified: "I don't think I was arguing that AI and technology will never be able to create value as defined as some sort of connection that didn't exist before... I think that's different than does this have artistic authorial merit?"

Martineau raised an important point about the unprecedented resources being poured into AI development: "I think the thing that we still haven't figured out is whether or not it's worthwhile spending an unprecedented amount of capital and resources and devoting an unprecedented amount of collective attention worldwide" to AI development without clear evidence of transformative breakthroughs.

This thought-provoking exchange highlights the evolving relationship between technology and creativity. While AI continues to advance at a remarkable pace, fundamental questions remain about the nature of consciousness, creativity, and what constitutes meaningful artistic expression.

As we navigate this new technological frontier, perhaps the most valuable approach is maintaining a balance between appreciating AI's capabilities while preserving our understanding of what makes human creativity uniquely valuable—the intentional communication of lived experience and emotion that Doctorow describes as the essence of art.